Developer Watercooler - Battle for Azeroth Class Design Overview

[Dadwen]

TLDR: we fucked up on class design and are gonna revert back to the way it used to be.

One could only wish, but not going to hold my breath one that one....

[Pachycrocuta]

So, they want to reverse the whole "Bring the player, not the class" from the end of Wrath/start of Cataclysm? Just bring back a lot of the things that were taken out when Cataclysm happened. What I miss are early level buffs. It was always fun when you are out in the world and a priest would give you Fortitude, or a mage would give out Arcane Brilliance, or a paladin would throw out a blessing on you, or you do that for someone.

[bearlolzx]

game died after they gave everyone interrupts and added catchup mechanics like lfr

[Erolian]

Your whole post is a good read and spot on. People complain about homogenization and classes being jacks of all trades, but on the other hand the alternatives are much worse, for example:
- being excluded from mythic+ that is a big part of pve / gearing content due to lack of something (aoe, cc, defensives)
- being benched on specific raid bosses (remember the usual "melee unfriendliness design" discussion that crops up every now and then)
- being undesirable class to recruit for guilds / invite to pugs due to community perception
- being forced to play multiple classes to cover all the niches because each class only covers some and then have to be "boosted" through the content where your class sucks to be useful in the content where your class shines
- guilds that can class stack due to robust roster / long bench / lots of split alts having tremendous advantage over guilds who can't afford it despite little to none skill disparity, which generally rewards nolifing more than skill (upkeeping multiple alts vs just 1 char)
- being forced into a narrow role you learn to hate (read all the threads about rogues hating to be soak bots)

And so forth.

In practice, class homogenization had little downsides, and the upside was you could play with your friends no matter what class they picked, having more leeway in composing your pugs and guild raids with less worry "oh no one from x class is around what are we gonna do". It was more practical, and more fun. I really don't miss ye olde times of "lf mage, rogue and hunter for dungeon, oomkins need not apply". Now instead of sap, sheep and trap you brought aoe stuns but the general idea was again some classes had something you wanted to bring while others ended up without.

And since MMORPGs are about investing into a character with levelling, gearing etc. it's not like HOTS or Overwatch where you can just decide "oh my team needs this, I better pick this hero it's perfect for the occasion". It doesn't feel great if you levelled a class only to find out it's not wanted in the end game activity you were interested in, or is only wanted as a gimnick. I don't get the vanilla nostalgia where a person would be happy to be only brought to spam buff kings.

Recently I read a thread where people complained that a demon hunter on mythic argus is best suited to run in the spirit realm and collect orbs - they wanted to dps instead. Now you see how it ends when you get utility - people hate it when you have to do "jobs" because your class has specific utility, even a narrow one like "extra speed while dead".

So why did the community complain about class homogenization in the first place? This is the outcome of it. And that wasn't the only thread, I mentioned rogues complaining about having to soak, then we have warlocks complaining they have to summon people, holy paladins complaining they can't deal with spread aoe healing while resto druids complain they have low overall hps and so forth. All those existing due to "niches" and utility classes have.

And the biggest doubt in the whole picture is - can we actually carve an unique niche for as many as 36 different specs? Won't some specs have to wait ages for their 5 min of glory only to slide back to the shadows immediately after? Is it inevitable we're gonna end with "meme specs" people don't want to invite?

This is the absolute truth about WoW class balance/design. Spec diversity and everyone having amazing and unique damage profiles and CC is a pipe dream. There will be winners and losers during next expansions character creation screen lottery because WoW does not have 36 different niches that are also supported remotely equally in any sort of content. The closest you'll get is if you consider the entire game as a whole rather than breaking it down by what the individual player wants to actually do and even then you'll come up far short.

So good luck everyone. Hopefully your class/spec is appropriate for whatever activity you actually enjoy next expansion.

[Lollis]

So, they want to reverse the whole "Bring the player, not the class" from the end of Wrath/start of Cataclysm? Just bring back a lot of the things that were taken out when Cataclysm happened. What I miss are early level buffs. It was always fun when you are out in the world and a priest would give you Fortitude, or a mage would give out Arcane Brilliance, or a paladin would throw out a blessing on you, or you do that for someone.

The idea of bring the player not the class is a pretty nice idea, but they never really got it to work primarily because it is impossible for them to balance everything properly. With the almost complete removal of class buffs, rather than making it more about the player it simply made your class less unique.

I fully understand and do kind of agree that it should be the player that is most important, but by totally removing class uniques, it takes too much away from the actual player experience. As much as it may be a pita casting buffs on people every raid or party, being able to made me personally feel closer to my class, it makes you part of a group rather than just being there on your own with a few other people.

When buffs were important you felt needed, that you contributed something. Now you are just here to heal, or tank, or dps. And this isn't what I want group content to be.

[Thelxi]

I found this very confusing. They are blatantly saying they want "bring the class not the player" back for one which is weird, and then they are saying they don't want the synergy between resource generating talents anymore (people playing feral know what they are talking about). Then they are also saying they will pretty much remove artifact skills and fill the dead space with new skills, which is also interesting to me because IMO specs like moonkin were finally in a good place in Legion after many years of poor design, largely due to the moon spells.

I'm just perplexed here wondering what I should be excited about in that philosophy. Taking away homogenization, talent synergies, artifact abilities while keeping the talent system itself which IMO is pretty bad and very rigid. On the topic of talents, they have said the same exact shit before about AoE and ST competing, complex math problems, situational etc. Idk what the point of this watercooler was. Even for Blizzard, this contained like nothing interesting.

[Biggles Worth]

Hey guys Blizzard indie game developer here where we don't really know what we're doing after all these years.

[Pandragon]

Is Blizz ever going to get it through their heads that talent choices will never be meaningful or complex? It always boils down to what deals the most damage. There will never be a "choice".

[Brewhan]

Aftering reading this whole thing I feel Blizzard is really struggling to produce a hype expansion that Legion was. They literally threw in the everything and the kitchen sink for ultimate fan service with Legion so now BfA and future expansions seem very barebones at best. Sure its alpha but what this long post tells me is basically they wan't to return some removed abilities because they pruned too far, they want to bring back class buffs for raid/group and tone down every class having massive CC in PvE. Talent system is fine if they remove that stupid tome but it's not really custom, some classes never change their talents for ST/AoE while other classes change 3-4 of their talents for ST to AoE fights ( Aff lock example) . It's not really fun changing talents it just like "damn I gotta use this stupid tome and change 3-4 talents so I can be top tier dps with the other raiders here " .

I just feel they aren't sure of themselves in this expansion yet and are playing it relatively safe.

[Ozzayel]

Ugh their plan for class design and going back to having only a couple classes bring key compenents is a terrible idea. It'll mean people not getting into groups that they would otherwise cos now the group needs 'this' or you're not wanted cos you don't have 'that. Meh.

And with how terrible Legion has been for dev's actually listening to player feedback, this doesn't fill me with confidence.
When was the last time they responded to to multiple hundred page threads from Hunters on the official feedback forums... it's been like a year.
And the few times they did respond they didn't even listen (for mm at least) -.-

[DisposableHero]

In my opinion, the failures of legion can be summed up in this developer QA as follows:

1) The devs extended the leveling experience well into the endgame by putting core rotation impacting abilities on artifact traits and legendarys, and created haves and have nots among the players based on RNG and time played which drove players away from the game in droves. Now that all of these things are going away, we have to spend all of our class design time for BFA fixing the damage this did both to class/spec kits and the community at large.

2) The devs focused like a laser on making talent choices "meaningful" in a very specific way that had a low low low chance of success in which a microscopic raindrop of fun and connection between dev and veteran player could be had, but where it failed, it created a vast vast ocean of negativity and a huge myriad of massively negative impacts on players. In addition, this focus caused overall class/spec kits to suffer more than they ever had in WoW's history leading to widespread discontent over the state of class mechanics.

[Nfinitii]

Interesting read, I really need to c some concrete changes before I can get exited though. They have taken pruning, talents and limiting buttons way to far.

Take arms for example. Most of its abilities got shoved into the talent tree and nvr looked at again. Rend, overpower, sudden death on the lego, pruned heroic strike, old sweeping strikes got removed etc. pretty much left w/ cs mortal strike and slam. I really want to play warrior but they completely fucked warriors so hard. Y change a good thing... u know it's bad when old school warriors like swifty r considering rerolling from warrior. Wtf

[Boricha]

The only artifact ability I can see keeping is void torrent for spriest. Other things like windburst or strike of the widnlord are just generic abilities that diversify your button presses but could be easily replaced with a different ability.

[Aggrophobic]

It’s really not hard to read that they saiid there adding new stuff and building some old stuff back, there not acting like it’s new.

I didn't say it was hard to read. I said the text doesn't actually give any information at all. It's just a wall of text with no actual meaning, or rather it could mean anything.

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The stuff they bring back can be improved though. If exorcism came back it doesn’t necessarily have to be the exact same thing, it can have some cool new things added to it.

I play Holy/ret currently, ret has hardly any RNG involved which makes it fun for me. I agree with MoP class design for the most part. Some classes/specs were very fucking boring though (ret pally just to name one) however there was a lot less RNG in the rotations.

Holy pally was fun, enhance and ele Sham were fun, lock was fun, survival hunter was fun. Those were the classes I played and I enjoyed them all but others were boring. I know arms/fury was very fun as well.

Who knows, maybe by adding back abilities, rotations will be more MoP-like. MoP did have a good amount of RNG but there were a lot of abilities that helped make the RNG feel less like RNG if that makes sense. There were other things to use if your “RNG” didn’t favor you.

In BFA we are getting a lot less RNG. 3 main slots can’t titanforge, no random legendaries, etc. Will see what the classes look like when beta opens up and provide feedback from there.

I'm sure it can but we haven't gotten any information about that yet. Thats my point. These dev watercoolers are nice and all but rather pointless if they don't actually give any information.

We also haven't really gotten any info about the amount of RNG becuase Blizzard had very little to share about BfA at all. The removal of legendaries is great but TF/WF is still there and they haven't talked at all about CDs, trinkets and maybe more importantly rewards and such.

With WoD being rather lackluster and Legion downright horrible it's hard to stay positive and expect the current dev team to get this one right. Heck, even the Blizzard devs looked like they weren't sure about BfA during last years Blizzcon. Why should their customers?

[buddah13]

Yeah, I see the team scrambling to continue to make this game "fun" , regardless of story or how things play out. The Artifact system was almost too good, I didnt have to farm for my main "damage" dealing thing. They needed to keep that system, and add Armor too it, make professions and gathering important again, thus leveling the gold dumps out. They painted themselves into too many corners.
Legion had a great story and decent enough execution at the end, however there really isn't much left to do but a slow rotation again and again. I always said make the fighting function like kingdom hearts and you would bring the player to the class. time to take a long break and see what blizzard does, as is i find most of their games to be pretty boring now as it is

[lewdest]

Why do they even bother posting this crap? I was involved in the WoD and Legion beta, and they didn't take suggestions at all. Classes that had awful design like Legion's Hunter and massive playstyle changes like removing Chi from Brewmaster and Mistweaver went through despite the backlash and suggestions on the forums.

[Aggrophobic]

This is a disaster waiting to happen.

While I totally get the desire to have unique class identities with strongly defined strengths and weaknesses, this runs into some very serious practicality issues when it comes to the available content. Because of the disparate nature of content, particularly between raids and M+, historically it has been a nightmare to balance classes with strong niches. Single-target specialists, for example, tend to go out of control in raid settings where a big boss is the main target - while being terrible in M+ because their AoE is so weak. Conversely, AoE burst classes have tended to dominate in M+, while being lackluster in most raid fights and overpowered in some others. And all that was with a class design that was largely homogeneous and had tons of overlap. If they emphasize strengths and weaknesses further, all I can see happening is more class stacking based on the role - essentially a reversal of their "bring the player, not the class" philosophy and something that has proven to be a very hotly debated issue among players.

A great example for the pitfalls of such design in the current state of the game is Affliction Warlock. They have a strong class fantasy and identity, but their supposed "niche" as multi-target specialists wreaks havoc on balance. Their single-target damage isn't amazing, but as soon as more than one target is introduced they ramp up to infinity and beyond. How to balance this without either a) nerfing their ST damage into actual oblivion; or b) curbing their multi-target potential so much the entire identity is lost to begin with? Strong spec identity simply doesn't work if you're middle of the pack in everything - see e.g. current MM hunter - or if you're over-specialized - see e.g. Elemental Shaman. And that's only talking raids, M+ is an even worse scenario where high keys are virtually completely devoid of certain specs while others are near-omnipresent.

I get their intentions, and I understand that it's a positive message to people because of course everyone thinks THEIR class is going to be so much better. But that's not a practicable reality. The trend towards homogenization is taking place FOR A REASON - people don't want to feel left out because their respective class "strength" doesn't happen to line up with what they're trying to do right now. It's the whole "wheelchair" meme all over again, and ToS is perhaps the biggest warning post we can put up against what happens when specialization runs out of control. See how many people appreciated the class stacking and class prejudice that happened there? Do you really want more of that? Because trust me, people will be SO quick to jump on it, 5% DPS difference is enough for them to cry "useless!" or "OP!" let alone more. And you can cry all you want that people are being unreasonable - at the end of the day, they're the players, and they will never be REASONABLE about it because PEOPLE aren't reasonable. Your class design isn't going to change human nature on the internet.

Pretty spot on.

[Explicit Teemo Nudes]

The problem, as I see it, is that there are mainly two groups of players that want different things. Not everyone in these groups want the same thing, but generally speaking.

The smaller of the two groups is where all raiders, M+ and high rank arena/RBG players are. They are competitive and care more about numbers and balance over class identity and niche specs/talents/abilities.

The larger group has the rest of the player base. People that don't give a shit either way, and people that do care about class+spec identity and think that's far more important than numbers and absolute balance down to 1%. Some casual raiders and M+ people, smaller guilds, playing with friends, casuals, roleplayers, solo players, levelers/alt players - those kind of players.

I belong to the second group, and for me WoW is getting so boring because everything has gotten so streamlined and uncreative. I hate what the "everything must be balanced down to 1%" has done to the game. The adventure is gone from the game, even if Blizzard managed to bring some of it back in Legion - mainly thanks to the awesome Suramar storyline and all the puzzles/secrets.

At the same time I do think that the raiding scene and such is important to the game. It belongs in a MMO game. So I do understand why Blizzard needs to listen to the smaller group aswell.
I guess what I really wish for, is that the competitive people wasn't so competitive and could enjoy an adventurous game and skip the number crunching :P

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This watercooler is such a big, fat /yawn. It's the same as always.
Blizzard don't want "balance". They want - and need - the game to be a rollecoaster or they won't be able to give all players what they want.
They prune, then add. Prune again, then add. Repeat. Repeat again.
They add systems that are "better than the previous ones", but then replace them in the next expansion because "they didn't work out as they had hoped".
They'll never work out better than they have, and they know it. They need to add this drama to the game to keep the players. People are drawn to drama. People invest their emotions, and when you invest your emotions you get attached - and that is exactly what they want.

Vanilla talent trees were bad because they were uncreative and boring. Spending talents for 1-2-3-4-5% extra frost damage is boring - but then they add that exact same thing to artifact weapons.
- Hey dev crew. Don't forget that we need to make sure mages, rogues, resto druids and holy paladins have 100% pick rate as usual. Yeah, but make sure enhance shamans, holy priests and whatever other dirt at the bottom of the barrel gets a small patch window where they'll be insanely good just so these players will stick around in the hopes that one day their class will get their 15 minutes of fame again.
Bring the player, not the class. No, no! Bring the class, not the player. Nah, guys, bring the player and not the class. Next expansion we bring the class and not the player.
Players! We have something exciting for you in this expansion! Secrets! You will get the chance to unlock a hidden appearance for your new weapon! Exciting, huh?! They will definitely not be a low drop chance from a boss that may not even spawn once a year, or something that you buy from a vendor. No, you will unlock them in very creative ways!
Also: we thought the old way of working your ass off to hit exalted with a faction and then buying the rewards is very uncreative and not fun, so we've added boxes that has an extremely low chance to drop a reward. So you need to grind to exalted a hundred times for the same faction. Gambling is so much fun and not time consuming at all.

-
My hopes are not high. Most will stay the same - or get worse - in the next expansion. But as I'm so deep into this game I still have that glimmer of hope that Blizzard made sure to plant in me.

[MatadorMedia]

ALPHA?? Not even the Beta test lawl. Get ready for 9 more months of Argus. They better release the Allied Races soon. I'm already bored.

[Mackeyser]

I meant something like crafting would scale to the endgame too. PvP gearing, or some solo/small group content (These islands may be it). Basically any sort of content, which can reward you end-game gear without actually forcing everyone to raiding/mythic dungeons. Something, where different specialization could be more useful in some other aspects of the game.

Because if they really want make classes more unique (which is fantastic), it means that these hardcore groups will just bench some classes even more, just because their utility is not perfectly suited for certain raids. And if Mythic and Raiding is only source of end-game top rewards, discussion about balance is always only about, and ONLY about, how they perform in raids.

Maybe it is okay, if not everyone can be top dog in raids, as long as they can be top dogs somewhere else and be rewarded for it.

I actually like this. I don't have the same time to devote to the game as I did. I would like to engage in more content, used to heroic raid (what would be mythic in Legion) raid lead, guild officer... all of that. Can't do it anymore for a number of reasons, but would like to not be relegated to LFR...ugh.

Would especially love having meaningful endgame profession content beyond alchemy.

Love the fishing legendary (still working on that) and hope they keep fishing and cooking relevant.

Oh, and Nomi can suck it.